They had disliked each other from the very beginning. For thirty-one years, I watched my mother and my husband exchange forced smiles, find excuses to leave the same room, and avoid saying more than necessary. Curtis once told me he would rather work a Christmas shift than sit at Eleanor’s table again. Whenever I asked what had happened, they both gave me the same vague explanation about coming from different worlds. I assumed it was about money. Eleanor had built a successful business, while Curtis had grown up with almost nothing. Then one night, after a terrible argument, I heard my mother hiss that he knew exactly what he had done. Curtis said nothing. Eventually, I stopped asking.

When Eleanor died at eighty-one, Curtis quietly left the funeral reception. I found him alone beside her coffin, whispering that he had kept their secret, that nobody had ever found out, and that it would remain buried beneath the red maple in her yard forever. That tree had always been strangely important to my mother. She planted it thirty-one years earlier and protected it like a child. That night, I returned to her house, took a shovel from the garage, and began digging beneath the tree. Three feet down, I struck something solid.